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UN/ISDR says China’s freak snowstorms are ‘the new normal’

Responding to the recent storms in China, Sálvano Briceño, Director of the Secretariat of the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UN/ISDR), said “the unprecedented scale, cost, and human impacts of China's freak month of snowstorms, its worst in 50 years, herald a need for the world to get ready for new kinds of disasters.”

Briceño said “the intensifying effect of climate change on weather, combined with global trends of rapid urbanization and environmental degradation, will lead to ever more complex disasters involving more and more people, and particularly affecting the poor.

The impact of these storms on China's vast, mobile population, are a lesson in how we need to reduce the risks associated with extreme weather that most countries can expect in the future.”